J.G. Ballard is more than just a science fiction or futurist fantasy merchant; he is one of the most significant of those British novelists who have established themselves since 1960.

Ballard is an ambitious author who has often stressed that the kind of fiction he writes is the authentic literature of the twentieth century, the only fiction which responds imaginatively to the transforming nature of science and technology. He believes that the present, rather than the future, is now the period of greatest moral urgency for the writer, and that science fiction becomes the mainstream--rather than a cult literature of dubious respectability--if, like his, it concerns itself with what he calls the inner space, as opposed to the outer space of the traditional, gadget-preoccupied science fiction. He made the same point more extensively in a recent interview:

I began writing in the mid-Fifties. Enormous changes were going on...